1. iTunes - to access iTunes U2. Safari - to make sure the sites I build work3. Quicktime Player - to play those .mp4 or .mov files in the browser

And all the 3 products sucked. I even used iTunes and Safari on a native Mac, not a Windows machine. Even now, when I have to use someone's Mac, I go nuts with that one button trackpad and the whole emphasis around drag and drop rather than use the keyboard.

But I have friends and family that are unlike me. I am surrounded by PC illiterate folks who don't understand the ABCs of computer security and keeping their anti virus up to date. And their lack of tech knowledge doesn't mean that I should stop associating with them, because they are great people otherwise. For them (and indirectly for me), Apple was a solution. Thanks to an iPad, my very old grandfather was able to talk to me from his couch thousands of miles away without having to learn to boot up a laptop. Earlier this year, he passed away. I agree that this could have been done on an Android tablet or a netbook too. But you can't deny that there are certain markets and needs that Apple addresses quite well.

While I may never buy an Apple product, I must thank Apple Inc. (not just Steve) for making a product that allowed me to keep in touch with my family. While Apple may not be the technology pioneers that their fans think they are, they are certainly another producer of quality, usable tech hardware (albeit with a steep price tag). And as a company, they have every reason to be proud of that.

-- Jobs was uncannily perceptive about the interface design and marketing of technology, but he was also a control freak who posed as an iconoclast – and after about 1980 he projected his control freakery on everything he shaped. The former trait did a great deal of good; the latter did a degree of harm that, sadly, may prove greater in the end.

-- It’s easy to point at the good Steve Jobs did. While he didn’t invent the personal computer, he made it cool, twice. Once in 1976 when the Apple II surpassed all the earlier prototypes, and again in 1984 with the introduction of the Mac. I’ll also always be grateful for the way Jobs built Pixar into a studio that combined technical brilliance with an artistic sense and moral centeredness that has perhaps been equaled in the history of animated art, but never exceeded.

-- But the Mac also set a negative pattern that Jobs was to repeat with greater amplification later in his life. In two respects; first, it was a slick repackaging of design ideas from an engineering tradition that long predated Jobs (in this case, going back to the pioneering Xerox PARC WIMP interfaces of the early 1970s). Which would be fine, except that Jobs created a myth that arrogated that innovation to himself and threw the actual pioneers down the memory hole.

-- Nearly a quarter-century later Jobs would repeat the same game with the iPhone. The people who did the actual innovating in smartphones – notably Danger with their pioneering Hiptop – got thrown down the memory hole by Jobs’s mythmaking (though in this case some of its principals would later achieve a kind of revenge by designing Android). And the iPhone “ecosystem” became notorious not merely for the degree of control and rent-seeking it imposed, but for the Kafkaesque vagueness and arbitrariness of Apple’s policies.

-- The velvet glove over Jobs’s iron fist was thinner that second time around; like most people who attract a cult following, he became increasingly convinced of his own infallibility. It was an error that eventually killed him; the kind of pancreatic cancer he had was essentially curable with early surgical intervention, but Jobs insisted on treating it with “alternative medicine” that didn’t work.

The world lost a great man.If he hadn’t overcharged hipsters and the computer illiterate for mediocre devices,others wouldn’t have gotten off their asses to make better, less expensive products.If he hadn’t made computers hip and trendy they wouldn’t have become our friends.

If not for the iPod, we’d be using mp3 miniCD players.If not for the iPhone, we’d be talking on monochrome Blackberries and Moto RAZRs.If not for the iPad, tablet computers would still cost a grand and be nothing more than laptops opened all the way.

Skynet destroyed the world because it was the social outcast. Now it’s one of the cool kids or at least a functioning member of the student body.

Was never an Apple man but I was proud member of the electronic age.You will be missed.Goodbye Mr. Jobs.

Never owned or even wanted an Apple product in my life, but there's no arguing Mr. Jobs' influence on everything else.

It's funny that the author defends RMS' use of Harold Washington's quote by saying that it was a quote... but he meant it in the same context. Just because you quote someone who said some sentiment that you agree to doesn't absolve you because they weren't your words. I don't think it was bad- it was just words. But I hate when people try to absolve themselves or others by saying it wasn't my words- I was just quoting!.

It is ironic that Steve Jabs, along with Steve Wozniac, helped put the concept of personal and freedom into computing. It's sad that once those concepts served their purpose in getting Apple where it wanted to be, Steve Jobs next decided it was time for Apple to take them away.